How do the semantic and pragmatic properties of a linguistic expression inform its social meaning(s)? We show that the intensifiers totally in American English and -issimo in Italian are perceived as more salient carriers of social meaning in context that require substantial pragmatic work to be interpreted; that is, when they occur in the absence of a gradable predicate (e.g., “totally click on a link”), as opposed to when they target a lexically supplied scale (e.g. “totally full””). We suggest that two factors make these semantic variants particularly apt to serve as social indexes. First, in both cases the semantics of the intensifiers fosters a heightened degree of epistemic and evaluative convergence between the speaker and the hearer, making these expressions particularly apt to perform identity work at the interactional level. Second, both uses of totally and -issimo are linguistically marked with respect to their lexical counterparts. As such, they emerge as suitable linguistic resources to be used for stylistic purposes, in a similar fashion to what has been observed for marked variants in the domain of phonological, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic variation (Bender 2000; Campbell-Kibler 2007, Podesva 2011; Acton and Potts 2014).

In this chapter, we move beyond belief reports to consider the semantics of desire reports (like Beatrix wants it to rain), which bring forth new puzzles that have inspired a literature of their own, and that implicate attitude reports in a wide variety of semantically relevant grammatical phenomena such as mood, modality, gradability, focus, and presupposition projection. We give central attention to the competing approaches to desire reports set forth in influential work by Irene Heim and by Kai von Fintel, and we discuss the various issues with these approaches that have inspired refinements and alternatives. We close by scaling out even further to consider broad points of similarity and divergence among different kinds of attitude reports, beyond belief and desire.

Chapter 4 is devoted to the intricate relation between case-marking and aspect. The first section deals with the partitive/accusative alternation on direct objects in Finnic languages. Typically, partitive objects correlate with a bounded reading of the VP, and accusative objects with an unbounded one. But this analysis is challenged by a group of Finnish stative predicates which require accusative complements, such as omistaa ‘own’ and sisältää ‘contain’. The chapter introduces the analyses that have been proposed to account for this fact. Section 4.2 turns to the topic of accusative adjuncts. Cross-linguistically, accusative case tends to be assigned to adjuncts that function as event delimiters, e.g. by measuring out an event along a time or path scale. It is shown that in several languages, event-delimiting adjuncts undergo the same alternations as direct objects, and evidence is provided that they receive structural accusative case. Both syntactic and semantic analyses of accusative objects and adjuncts are discussed. Finally, Section 4.3 considers accusative case-assignment to complements of goal prepositions in German, Russian and Ancient Greek, asking whether this phenomenon is related to the aspectual function of accusative case.

This chapter outlines the impact of the Sorites Paradox in linguistics, with particular focus on its relation to semantic and pragmatic analyses of gradability and comparison. Section 2 describes the importance of philosophical work on vagueness and the Sorites Paradox for early attempts in linguistics to provide compositional analyses of the relation between positive and comparative adjectives. Section 3 then discusses subsequent linguistic analyses of these phenomena, and the extent to which they succeed or fail in providing isnights on vagueness and the Sorites Paradox. Section 4 explores the ways in which the Sorites Paradox has been used to uncover grammatically significant distinctions between classes of gradable predicates, and Section 5 concludes with a discussion of the connection between the Sorites Paradox and new lines of research geared towards understanding communication under semantic uncertainty.